Unofficial news and tips about Google

December 11, 2008

Google Chrome 1.0 Released

"We've heard a lot of feedback about product bugs and feature requests and have worked hard to prioritize work on them. We're excited to announce that with today's fifteenth release we are taking off the "beta" label," explains a post from Google Chrome Help Announcement blog. Ironically, the post doesn't look very well in Chrome.

There aren't many differences between the first release of Google Chrome and the version released today: besides fixing bugs and improving the support for plug-ins, Chrome added a bookmarks manager. The browser still lacks many basic features and customization options: previewing feeds, print preview, customizable "new tab" page, form autocomplete (this feature will be added soon) and there are many issues that should have been fixed before even considering to remove the "beta" label.

Google Chrome is not out of beta because it's ready, but because Google wants to sign some deals with computer manufacturers like Dell that will preinstall the browser. " The Google's open source browser has a number of eager customers, including OEMs who can't offer the browser until it is in full release," mentions TechCrunch. Even German's Federal Office for Information Security said that Google's browser is not for general use because it's still in beta. If that's price to increase the adoption, then Google didn't have to do much: just pretend that Chrome is ready for prime-time.

"We have removed the beta label as our goals for stability and performance have been met but our work is far from done. We are working to add some common browser features such as form autofill and RSS support in the near future. We are also developing an extensions platform along with support for Mac and Linux," reminds us Google's blog.

It's clear that Google targets Internet Explorer's users and it will need to use an aggressive campaign to promote the browser and to succeed where Mozilla couldn't. But even if IE is slower and less secure than Chrome, it certainly has less glaring bugs than Chrome (open Google Book Search, click on a book, read 5-6 pages and then try to use the back button).

Let me try to object to all these objections. What is a stable version of a software anyway? It's meant to declare that the program is ready to be used for production and for general purposes as it is intended in the specification and with the announced and documented feature set it contains.

Is Google Chrome a web browser? It is, as I am browsing the web with it. Does it meet the core idea of what a web browser should do? Well, it's rendering web pages pretty much by the standards and brings you swiftly any web content you might want to access. Is it stable? Yes for me and even if it is questionable in some occasions, I don't see you ground your criticism on that point.

More features would bring more convenience indeed. But none of the missing features can scrutinize the very notion of a general purpose web browser. At that point, I see no reason for Google to hold down the sales.

Also, removing the beta label means that the company is taking full responsibility for their offering. And that's a good thing.

Is it just me, or is it much less stable than the beta? I never saw the beta crash ever, and 1.0 has crashed 3 times in the last 10 minutes, killing ALL tabs in the process (I thought this couldn't happen?!). I'm going back to the beta version.

I just checked the announcement post, and it looks identical in Chrome and in Firefox. And I agree with yunuz that a lack of enhancements is no reason to keep Chrome in beta. The point of not stopping at version 1.0 is to keep adding features. The first stable release should be just that, stable. Now, the issues that people seem to be having with actually browsing the web are certainly reasons to say the browser isn't stable, in those cases. If those cases are not prominent, if they affect a small subset of websites or a small subset of users, then it is relatively stable (certainly as stable as any production software released in this atmosphere of patching via download on a regular basis). I don't have any idea of the how many people or sites are affected by the issues discussed above, so I can't judge whether or not they are still major issues, they may or they may not. I just know that I use Chrome whenever I can. There are a few sites that don't work right for me, but the same is true of both Firefox and IE. It doesn't ruin the other benefits I get from using Chrome.

Alex Chitu... Is that Alex Chitu I used to know from Panduri? Soryy for the off topic! Glad to hear that Google can compromise in it's own way. I swithed to Chrome becouse it's darn fast. Still missing some features from Firefox but don't complain for the lack of Googlr Toolbar, there are enough ways to get pretty much the same with bookmarks/notebook/keywords and i will chose the minimal design over so called lack of features anytime. But still waiting for add-ons, tho I'm using just a few in Firefox: mouse gestures (FireGestures), Showcase and NoScript. I'm gonna test on a spare PC the Firefox' NoScript vs Chrome's sandbox on some nasty pages...

An important fact from Google's blog post: "In just 100 days, we have reached more than 10 million active users around the world (on all seven continents, no less) and released 14 updates to the product." Can you find the number of active users for Opera and Firefox?

I'm not entirely sure why they don't release the version with autoscroll.It seemed stable enough for me when i used it.The only problems were stupid laptop scrolls that probably use hacks to use the scrollbars in the first place. (hence scrolling up, but not down, or vice versa)The only problem i really saw with the autoscroll i used was no icon showing where you middle-clicked in the first place.

Anyway, for the release from Beta.It is stable, it works pretty well for most cases.It looked more like a finished product when it was launched, pretty much no crashes, besides the %: thing and weird bugs here and there.Those bugs have been fixed. A program doesn't need to be feature-complete to be a final product.If you were to sit and code in every single feature out there, it would take much longer to be released.